The Infinite Library

i cope.

Copyright © 2011 Kane X. Faucher

Cover image copyright © 2010 Nicolas Grospierre and used with permission.

All Rights Reserved

CCM Cover and Design by Michael J Seidlinger

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Selections in previous incarnations have appeared in Copious Magazine, Ken*Again, Sixth Ward Review, Journal of Experimental Fiction 39, and Camera Obscura (later winning the Outstanding Fiction Award).

The author would like to extend his gratitude to the magazines that published earlier sections of this work, the generous readers who read previous drafts of the novel, and the artist Nicolas Grospierre for kindly granting the publisher permission to reproduce his library image.

First paperback edition.

Published in the United States of America

Civil Coping Mechanisms (www.copingmechanisms.net)

ISBN
978-0-9846037-8-7

The Infinite Library

*

Kane X. Faucher

For the Librarians

Published on the 25th anniversary of Jorge Luis Borges’ death and 70 years after the publication of his story, The Library of Babel, in his collection
El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.

... because I cannot conceive a mountain without a valley, it does not follow that there is any mountain or valley in existence, but simply that the mountain or valley, whether they do or do not exist, are inseparable from each other.

René Descartes,
Meditations
(5
^th
Meditation)

cave ab homine unius libri!

Categories in the Trilogy

The Infinite Library

(Book I of III)

Kane X. Faucher

I
n the beginning there was the Word. The Word first drifted emptily, an itinerant thing before it became imbued with energy to form a relationship to become Data. This data was expressed in matter by way of a book, and the Word made its impact there. The Word was
full
, and from it all other words would derive from it. In one explosive moment too small for any instruments to measure, the Word spread and filled the Library, these words nested within more books than can be counted. Every possible variation of the Word makes up the entire holdings of the Library, but one thing was lacking to make the Word resonate with meaning and sense: the Librarian. And so, from the Word also came the Librarian who was made distinct by being split in two. The first Librarian had access to the entire catalogue, and knew the tasks, while the other did not have either of these traits.

The word, attired as data, is compressed into a code or a cipher. And everything that is meant to appear throughout the story must all appear now, in condensed form, a coalescing of all possible colours into one band of white.

The expression of the Word cannot be condensed in any single volume, let alone three, but the expression of the Word does involve three narrative phases: information, energy, and matter.

BOOK I: CODEX INFINITUM

1

The Invisible Book

“
L
et your vast Library be justified!” the unnamed Librarian in Borges' “Library of Babel” declaimed in desperation. In the face of an infinite library, it is the most thoughtful demand to make. But if the Library cannot be justified, which is to say that if the purpose of existence cannot be traced to a purpose or design as to its beginning or end, then at least it should be
organized
. Information is what organizes matter and energy into some stable form of
random coherence
. That's the best I can make of it.
Any mathematician would be exasperated by my ju
venile understanding of infinity and information, and any philosopher would dismiss my musings as irrelevant or in want of reason. But I am not a mathematician or a philosopher. I believe that there is one station higher than these two, and it is the librarian, the art and grace by which he or she can organize our most seemingly miscellaneous information to facilitate its storage, retrieval, and methods for improved accessibility. I am far from being a religious man, but if there was a god, he or she or it would be a librarian – thus is the primacy of information over energy and matter.

Anchoring points of time and place: Vatican City, 2007, on a fruitless research junket, given permission to forage through the Vatican holdings courtesy of fancy letterhead, two institutions. My name is Alberto Gimaldi. His name was Castellemare, a self-proclaimed librarian. His physique was narrow and bony, composed entirely of haphazard piping and knotted joints in some kind of Soviet industrial parody on human anatomy, angular bones floating in aspic features and an odd affectation of uncertain origin. He always wore the most conspiratorial grin upon that Jack O’ Lantern of a face, I bet even in his most private moments. He said he was of mixed parentage without ever qualifying any further, and if I may say so without sounding ridiculous, he was the only person I have met that lacked the residual trauma we all bear in having once been born. Perhaps it was not that he was born, but
printed
, the origin of body and book being one. His specialty was, indeed, books, but books
of a different type
.

Of myself, there is not much to say that would bear interested hearing, nothing plangent or remarkable about the scholastic years of empty service, the dull rustle or scribble here and there to mark time. But I have to fill the time and say something, generate sympathy with whoever hears my tale, and this through being so painfully average or mediocre in as many ways that my eccentricities are absorbed and subsequently negated.

I am a largely forgettable mind desultorily hitched to a frumpy body. There are two concerns in my daily affairs, both united by bibliophilia: either I am trafficking in enigmatic texts or I am cracking the codes and ciphers of the most mysteriously penned codices. The one habit supplies the other since I make a modest enough income to fuel my travels to various manuscript libraries in Europe to continue my assiduous research, research that is largely uninteresting except to the most niche specialists. I have published a few articles on untranslatable incunabula without bothering to offer any solutions, a few reviews of what is current in glyptology, cryptology, and cryptanalysis. In such instances, I parrot what has already been said by merely grafting the seminal references in a different order, my work drawing to its end as inconclusive, petering off as a littoral of quotations and a bland toss-off summary of all the nothing that was said. Sometimes I give myself the task of debunking hasty theorists who employ the most absurd of methodologies in cracking
what is a mere “Greeking” of text, or refuting those who claim that certain texts are just hoaxes by dem
onstrating how the code actually works. It is largely shadowboxing, but it takes on an especial importance among those of us who share a concern that is centuries dated. I have cracked a few codices in my time, most notably two:
De heteromachina rerum
(author unknown) and the luridly extraterrestrial Serafini’s
Codex Seraphinianus
. Actually, I failed to crack the latter, but I let the rumour persist without worrying about anyone checking to see if there is any support
for a claim I can disown if pressed. Although such
preoccupation sounds to the outsider as thrilling, glamourous, fraught with penetrating the shibboleths of conspirators resulting in peril, it is nothing of the sort. It is dry and tedious work, not the sort of Da Vinci Code hijinx that seeks to uncover the one secret conspiracy that motors history. No such things exist, or at least not in the register one would mundanely imagine.